(2021) Ringlefinch - Tall Tales


Review:
…Taking their name from a species of one-armed trolls that feature in the 2010 Norwegian film Troll Hunter, fronted by Andy Logan, who also plays banjo, uke and charango, London alt-folk septet Ringlefinch have a decidedly playful approach to their music and lyrics, drawing on such influences as The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, The Lumineers, Bellowhead, Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance and a hearty dollop of shanty. It opens in splendid form with ‘Edward Gorey’s Gory Stories’, the title and the song referencing the American writer and pen and ink artist who, a sort of Roald Dahl of Chicago, made his name in the late ’50s and mid-’60s with a series of illustrated books containing his deliciously macabre stories, inevitably very popular with children. From its opening line, “I thought I lost her at hello”, it rattles along with rumbustious glee, unfolding as a love song that explores identity and acceptance, drawing on its literary allusions with the lover here compared to discovering what lies between the covers of a book, the track scurrying off to some Middle Eastern Bazar for the instrumental bridge. Again filtering Eastern European tones, another real-life character serves as the narrative of The Prince Of Poyais, unfolding the true story of how, in the 1820s, returning to London from a military career in Central America, Gregor MacGregor pulled off the con of the century by duping investors into raising what would now be millions of pounds to buy shares in Poyais, a small country off the Atlantic coast. And so, 250 eager colonists set off to their new home, only to find it didn’t exist and the land they found was barren and unliveable. Naturally, such brazen audacity warrants a rousing shanty treatment, and the band duly oblige with all sails blowing and call and response shouts. An ode to trying to carve a place in the world, however small, with its massed voices backing, the no less lively Making It, complete with fiddle break, celebrates muddling through as the new success to be followed by the thumping drum, banjo and uke driven Tongue In Cheek, viola player Gillian Hunter-Gibbs sharing vocals, borrows from surrealist metaphysics in a number about how the awkward silence after saying something you immediately regret to the one you love takes on a life of its own and meaning shapeshifts wilfully. Slowing the pace down just slightly, Just Enough Rope, set on a Sunday afternoon near Kentish Town, takes a wry look at depression, as the narrator finds himself accompanied through his life by a young man, the pair gradually coming to understand one another and finding reconciliation with the situation. Yes, it’s a metaphor. Having done real lives, over watery fingerpicked guitar., they turn to a fictional one for the melancholy rippling pizzicato Ophelia, Hamlet’s doomed lover, her fate serving as a cautionary tale about unequal relationships before, for 35 seconds, Emma Hamilton’s stately cello transports us to Woolpacks, a scattered group of grindstone boulders brooding over Kinder Scout in the Peak District. Donning Arran jumpers and fisherman’s smocks again, Gone South melds shanty and klezmer for a metaphysical tale of the tense relationship between a man and his concepts of travelling to sunnier climes to avoid winter. Fiddle and banjo set the scene for Dust & Stones; a Gypsy-folk meets Morricone musing on mortality and those who have gone before us and shaped what we have become that sports the line “I don’t burn bridges, I let them decay”. And then, oh joy, they treat us to a splendid cover of Tom Lehrer’s blackly humoured satirical 1959 classic The Masochism Tango (“I ache for the touch of your lips, dear / But much more for the touch of your whips, dear”), surely incentive enough to stop reading this and order the album forthwith. Featuring Alice Quayle on bassoon, the mandolin-driven Pommes De Lune is a Pennines shanty Logan describes as trawling everything from The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to Yellow Submarine, the album playing out in marathon form with the sixteen-minute Coldwell Clough, a Stackridge-like epic song cycle in eight parts, with some lengthy instrumental passages (one of which sounds positively medieval) that, drawing on Logan’s own heritage, charts a day-long landmark-by-landmark hike from Castleton to Hayfield, taking in memories of childhood, the local landscape and incorporates guitarist Arun Entwistle’s Mass Trespass Part II, recalling the 1932 act of civil disobedience when, passing through Coldwell Clough, hundreds of ramblers defied landowners and police and helped to establish the right to roam, the song’s essence returning to question how where we come from shapes who we are. Drawing on a variety of musical cultures, but English folk music down to its roots, these are tall tales to be recounted over and over with a smile on the face and a glass of Peak District craft beer in your hand. —  folkradio.co.uk





Track Listing:
1.Edward Gorey's Gory Stories 04:50
2.The Prince Of Poyais 04:36
3.Making It 03:38
4.Tongue In Cheek 02:47
5.Just Enough Rope 03:19
6.Ophelia 04:25
7.Woolpacks 00:34
8.Gone South 04:13
9.Dust & Stones 04:11
10.The Masochism Tango 02:38
11.Pomme De Lune 03:51
12.Coldwell Clough 16:23


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits